Abraham Lincoln and
Frederick Douglass

By Ethan Lewis

Abraham Lincoln would be 197 years old today,
and if he could stand before us gathered here, he would probably
look terrible. But seriously, it’s a pleasure to speak to
you today about one of the most important figures in American
history. One of the tasks I have my history students do is learn
all of the places in the Constitution that refer to
slavery. There are five of them. These passages were
not removed until after the extremely bloody second American
Revolution, led by Abraham Lincoln, which is commonly called the
Civil War. As we share this time together, in the month
during which we celebrate the birth of Lincoln, as well as
African-American history, I thought it was appropriate to look
at how Lincoln and the issue of race intersect in history, and
how, through the intercession of another great American, Lincoln
came to see the value of what is now the First Principle of
Unitarian-Univeralism: the inherent worth and dignity of every
person.

Abraham Lincoln was born poor in Kentucky, the
son of Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, though some doubt exists
as to whether Thomas was Abraham’s biological father. They
soon moved to Indiana, where over the space of several years,
the future President received all of the formal education he
would ever have. He described it as coming in “littles”,
and not amounting to more than 12 months in total. Despite
this lack of schooling, he had a breathtaking amount of
intellectual curiosity, common sense and ambition, which led him
to teach himself the law, and become a thriving legal
practitioner after his move to Illinois in his 20’s.

While Lincoln was too poor to have any direct
experience with slavery, his future wife, Mary Todd, came from
one of Kentucky’s leading slave-holding families (in one of the
many tragedies of the Civil War three of her half brothers and a
brother-in-law died fighting for the Confederacy), and, as a
politician on the make, Lincoln had definite opinions on what
was, from 1846 on, the leading political topic of the day.

In the 1850’s Lincoln’s Whig Party shattered
upon impact with the onrushing freight train of slavery
expansion into the Western territories newly wrung from Mexico
and the Native Americans. Lincoln joined the new
Republican Party, and ran for Senate against Stephen A. Douglas,
a Democrat reviled by many Republicans for his efforts in
passing “compromise” legislation such as the Fugitive Slave
Law. This law was unpopular because it gave financial
incentive for government agents to take free persons of color
and send them to the South as “escaped slaves”.
Lincoln and Douglas (who as a young man had courted Mary
Todd—it’s always a small world, isn’t it?) famously debated on a
multitude of topics up and down the state of Illinois. While
Douglas won the election, Lincoln gained gravitas and a
reputation, and in 1860, he became the second Republican nominee
for President.

In 1860 Lincoln was elected President in a
four-candidate race, claiming approximately 39% of the vote, and
was not on the ballot in 10 of the future Confederate
States. Immediately following his election, the secession
movement became a reality, and by April of 1861, 11 states had
withdrawn from the Union of states to form a new nation,
conceived in oppression, the Confederate States of
America. The secession of these states was based on a fear
that Lincoln (widely reputed to be a foe of slavery) would take
steps to restrict the “peculiar institution” and destroy the
Southern way of life. At this stage it is important to
look at Lincoln’s views on slavery, and on race.

***

While Lincoln may have been among the best men
of his time, he was definitely OF HIS TIME.
Lincoln
was a consistent opponent of slavery, but he was not an
abolitionist. There were many true abolitionists, who
recognized that slavery was the greatest evil in America and
must be eradicated. Many of those were Unitarians, such as
Julia Ward Howe (who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”),
Edward Everett (the orator who was the featured speaker at the
dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery), and Hannibal Hamlin
(Lincoln’s first Vice-President). On the other hand, there
were many people (known as “free-soilers”) who felt that slavery
was an unfair competition with white workers, and wanted jobs
and land reserved for “free”, i.e., white men. This is
analogous to modern opponents of offshoring of textile
jobs. Some people oppose the exploitation of foreign
workers who earn pennies an hour without decent working
conditions, while others only focus on the loss of American
jobs. Both are on the “right side” of the issue, but one
has (in my opinion) a stronger moral basis for their
stance. Anyway, Lincoln was definitely a “free soil”
opponent of slavery.

In the 1850’s he became the chair of Illinois’
Colonization Society. This group was part of a larger
movement dedicated to the idea of removing black people from
North America, and colonizing them in Central America or
Africa. Liberia and Sierra Leone are two examples of
African nations originally established as homes for relocated
slaves. Six years prior to being elected President,
Lincoln gave a speech in Peoria, Illinois (and if it plays in
Peoria…) in which he said “If all earthly power were given me, I
should not know what to do as to [slavery]. My first
impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to their
own native land.” While he later admitted in the speech
that such a plan was “impossible”, he went on to pose the
rhetorical question “should blacks be made politically and
socially our equals”? His own response was “My own
feelings will not admit of this… We can not, then make
them equals”.

Two years later, in a debate with Stephen
Douglas for the Illinois Senatorial campaign of 1858, he said “I
have no purpose to introduce political and social equality
between the white and black races. There is physical difference
between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever
forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect
equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must
be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the
race to which I belong having the superior position.”

Lest we believe that these were just unguarded
remarks of a candidate for lesser office, consider that as
President, Lincoln (who had a lot of “earthly power” by then)
continued to push for colonization. In August of 1862 (a
month before announcing the Emancipation Proclamation) Lincoln
met with African-American religious leaders, and tried to
persuade them to see the virtue of his argument. In the
meeting he said:

You and we are different races….
Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but
this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us
both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many
of them by living among us, while ours suffer from
your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If
this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we
should be separated. …

I do not propose to discuss this,
but to present it as a fact with which we have to
deal. …. I need not recount to you the effects upon
white men, growing out of the institution of Slavery.
… See our present condition---the country engaged in
war!---our white men cutting one another's throats,
none knowing how far it will extend; and then consider
what we know to be the truth. But for your race among
us there could not be war, although many men engaged
on either side do not care for you one way or the
other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution
of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war
could not have an existence.

The African-American ministers were not
convinced by Lincoln’s awkward entreaty to be exiled from the
country they built with their blood, toil, sweat and tears, and
I tend to look at this as a turning point in his thinking.
Perhaps, having finally aired his “pie in the sky” ideas to the
people on whom they would have the most effect, and seeing how
unpopular they were, Lincoln began to realize the need for ALL
Americans to unite, rather than simply to restore a fatally
flawed Union.

Shortly after this meeting, following the Union
victory at Antietam, Lincoln announced his Emancipation
Proclamation. While this landmark Executive Order was
ethically lacking (it only freed the slaves in the
Confederacy—slaves in Union states like Delaware and Maryland
were not released from bondage), it was the first step taken by
the United States to live up to the ideals from which our
country was founded—equality for all.

***

While we know for certain Lincoln’s birthdate,
there is another great figure of that time period whose earliest
days are shrouded in mystery. Frederick Douglass wrote
that “I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell
of his birthday”, because slave owners did not want slaves to
have any self-knowledge, even to the point of knowing the month
of their births. Douglass was probably born in 1818, about
9 years after Lincoln, on a plantation in Maryland. He was
uncertain about who his father was, and only met his mother (who
had been sold to a different plantation) a few times before she
died when he was four. He was given about three (illegal)
lessons in reading at the age of approximately 7, and from then
taught himself to read and write over the next 10 years. At the
age of approximately 20 or 21 he escaped to New England, and
began speaking at abolitionist rallies. He eventually
published two periodicals (The North Star and Douglass’
Monthly) as well as three autobiographies, and flaunted
the Fugitive Slave Law. Douglass wrote for a white
audience, and the overriding goal of his writing was to convince
white Americans to stop ignoring the greatest evil of their
time, and to take action against slavery. He was a
supporter of John Brown, and turned down an invitation to join
Brown on his doomed raid of the Federal armory at Harper’s
Ferry.

Douglass was a tireless advocate of freedom,
and of forcible resistance to the “Slave Power”. He
believed in the ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of
Independence, and wanted white Americans to live up to those
standards. He rightly criticized Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation as insufficient, but he recognized it as the
necessary first step of the journey to the promised land of
freedom. Douglass campaigned in print and in person for
African-Americans to join the Union Army (two of his sons fought
in the Massachusetts 54th, as seen in the movie Glory).
"Who
would be free themselves must strike the blow”, Douglass
implored. “I urge you to fly to arms and smite to death
the power that would bury the Government and your liberty in the
same hopeless grave. This is your golden opportunity."
When asked if he thought that fighting for freedom should be a
burden solely for blacks, he angrily retorted, "The problem is
whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough,
patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution."

Douglass visited with Lincoln in August of 1863
to discuss recruitment efforts, at which time he persuaded the
President that African-American soldiers should be paid as much
as Caucasians. I believe that the mutual admiration which grew
between these self-made, self-taught men, who both emerged from
the most humble beginnings, greatly influenced Lincoln to change
his opinions about race, and about who should be considered
American. Less than three months after the meeting in the
White House, Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, the site of the
bloodiest battle in North American history.

Lincoln famously began the speech by reminding
his listeners that the child “America” born 87 years prior, had
been “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition
that ALL MEN are created equal.” Not equally,
as some advocates of slavery would have it, but equal in the
eyes of God. As the speech reached its climax, Lincoln
took a page from Douglass’ style and urged those listening to
(and reading) his speech to be “dedicated to the task remaining
before us…that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom”.

“A new birth of freedom”. A noble goal
that people would willingly fight and die for. A promise that
post-war America would not be sundered into free and
unfree. An endorsement of the “promissory note” that
Martin Luther King came to claim 100 years later at the feet of
the civic temple erected in Lincoln’s memory. “A new birth
of freedom” for all Americans.

***

Lincoln was not a typically religious man.
According to James Smith, Lincoln’s favorite pastor in
Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln “believed some form of providence
was at work in the universe, but was unable to believe in a
personal God or in Jesus as his savior.” Sounds kind of like
UU-ism to me! But despite not being a member of a church,
Lincoln was a constant reader of the Bible. His Second
Inaugural Address is Biblical in scope and theme, as he
simultaneously merges the punishments of a vengeful Old
Testament God with the resurrection in blood of a new, holier
nation.

At the outbreak of hostilities, Lincoln said
“all knew”, that slavery “was somehow, the cause of the war”. He
went on to reflect,

“If we shall suppose that American
Slavery is one of those offences which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having
continued through His appointed time, He now wills to
remove, and that He gives to both North and South,
this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the
offence came, shall we discern therein any departure
from those divine attributes which the believers in a
Living God always ascribe to Him?

Fondly do we hope--fervently
do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may
speedily pass away.

Yet, if God wills that it continue,
until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two
hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be
sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the
lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,
as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must
be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and
righteous altogether"

He closed with the famous exhortation to
Americans to forgive and rebuild a newer, stronger, America:

“With malice toward none;
with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as
God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's
wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the
battle, and for his widow, and his orphan--to do all
which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting
peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Later that day, Lincoln saw Frederick Douglass
at a celebratory reception. Douglass had (at first) been
refused entry to the White House, but finally gained admission
when he was vouched for as a friend of the President. In a
later memoir, Douglass described the moment:

“Recognizing me, even before I
reached him, he exclaimed, so that all around could
hear him, “Here comes my friend Douglass”.
Taking me by the hand, he said, “I am glad to see
you. I saw you in the crowd today, listening to
my address, how did you like it?” I said, “Mr.
Lincoln, I must not detain you with my poor opinion,
when there are thousands waiting to shake hands with
you”. “No, no!”, he said, “you must stop a little
Douglass, there is no man in the country whose opinion
I value more than yours. I want to know what you think
of it”. “I replied, Mr. Lincoln, it was a sacred
effort”

Less than six weeks later, a mentally
unbalanced defender of the old ways murdered Lincoln. We
will never know if the newly reformed Lincoln could have led the
way to a newly reformed America, in which the races
related in perfect harmony. A decade later, at a ceremony
commemorating Lincoln’s assassination, Frederick Douglass
summarized Lincoln thus:

In his interest, in his
association, in his habits of thought, and in his
prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently
the white man's President, entirely devoted to the
welfare of the white man. He was ready and willing at
any time during the first years of
his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice
the rights of humanity in the colored people, to
promote the welfare of the white people of this
country.

However,

though the Union was more to him
than our freedom or our future, under his wise and
beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from
the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and
manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by
measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we
saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of
prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away
from the face of our whole country;… under his rule…
we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea
that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever,
battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds;
under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw
Abraham Lincoln, … penning the immortal paper, which,
though special in its language, was general in its
principles and effect, making slavery forever
impossible in the United States. Though we waited
long, we saw all this and more.

As I end this speech, I am reminded of
Lincoln’s words at a similar point in his first Inaugural
Address, and I am moved to say that “I am loath to close”.
I think that we can learn so much from the story of Abraham
Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, about trust, personal growth,
and above all, the inherent worth and dignity of every
person. Just as Lincoln, while completely absorbed in the
most horrific war ever to happen to Americans managed to find
within himself the ability to change his mind
about racial identity and Americanism, I hope that we will find
similar strength whenever we are confronted with the opportunity
to break the paradigms with which we were raised
and stride boldly into a new future in which we relate with our
fellow beings in peace and love.